“Beautiful Lahaina,” warbles Isabella Bird Bishop, in her charming book “Hawaii”; “Sleepy Lahaina,” she ecstatically trills—and she is not the only writer who has sung the praises of this town of royal preference, once the prosperous capital of the kingdom, and the oldest white settlement, where touched the whaling ships that sometimes anchored fifty strong off shore. But this prosperity entailed disease and death, since the sailors were given free run by their unscrupulous captains. The village dwindled to less than a wraith of its former opulence, much of the original site now being planted to cane.
A short distance above the town, at an altitude of 700 feet, the old Lahainaluna (“upper Lahaina”) Seminary, founded in 1831 by the missionaries, still flourishes, maintaining its reputation as an excellent industrial school. The land on which it stands was a gift from Hoopili Wahine, wife of Hoopili, governor of Maui. The original school opened in a temporary lanai shed of kukui poles with grass roof. Tuition was free; but the scholars did what work was required, and raised their own food. Among the pupils of The Reverend Lorrin Andrews were some of the finest young men from the islands, many of whom were married. During the next year a stone building with thatched roof was raised by the scholars. In 1833 a very much worn printing outfit was obtained and placed in charge of Mr. Ruggles, with the aid of which school books were printed; and the very first Hawaiian newspaper was published, the Lama Hawaii (“Hawaiian Luminary”), preceding the Kumu Hawaii, at Honolulu. Mr. Andrews prepared the first Hawaiian Grammar, and later the Hawaiian Dictionary.
The reader of Isabella Bird longs for Lahaina above all bournes; Lahaina, Seat of Kings! He cannot wait to test for himself its spell of loveliness and repose. But this repose is of the broad day, or else the gallant lady’s mosquito net was longer than ours, which did cruelly refuse to make connection with the coverlet. Jack’s priceless perorations will ever be lost to posterity, for I shall repeat them not.
In the morning, Mrs. Thurston peeped laughingly in and asked if I knew my husband’s whereabouts; and I, waking solitary, confessed that I did not, though I seemed to recall his desertion in a blue cloud of vituperation against all red-headed hotel hosts and stinging pests. Mrs. Thurston, viewing the blushing morn from the second-story veranda, had come upon the weary boy fast asleep on the hard boards, blanket over head and feet exposed, as is the wont of sailors and tramps, and led me to where he lay. But none more vigorously famished than he, when we sat in an open-air breakfast room, table spread with land fruit and sea fruit; for Mr. Thurston had been abroad early to make sure the repast should be an ideal one after our hard night—fish from the torchlight anglers, alligator pears dead-ripe out of the garden, mangoes of Lahaina, the best in the Islands, and coffee from the Kona Coast.
Mrs. Bishop, in the seventies, spoke of Lahaina as “an oasis in a dazzling desert.” The dazzling desert has been made to produce the cane for two great sugar mills whose plantations spread their green over everything in sight to the feet of sudden mountains, rent by terrific chasms that rise 6000 feet behind the village. Once this was a missionary center as well as the regular port of call for the devastating whale ships. The deserted missionary house, fallen into decay these long years, is still landmark of a Lahaina that but few live to remember. But the blood of the missionaries has neglected not to make hay, or, more properly, sugar, under the ardent sun.
The streets of the drowsy town are thickly shaded by coconuts, breadfruit with its glossy truncated leaves and green globes, monkey-pod, kukui, bananas, and avocados; and before we bade farewell to Lahaina, Mr. Thurston drew up beside an enormous mango tree, benefactor of his boyhood, where an obliging Hawaiian policeman, in whose garden it grows, with his pretty wife threw rocks to bring down a lapful of the ripe fruit—deep yellow, with crimson cheeks, a variety known as the “chutney” mango.
It is some twenty-three scenic miles from Lahaina to Wailuku, and the road runs for a distance through tall sugar cane, then begins an easy ascent to where it is cut into the sides of steep and barren volcanic hills above the sea. There was a glorious surf running, and for miles we could gaze almost straight down to the water, in places catching glimpses of shoals of black fish in the blue brine where there was no beach and deep ocean washed the feet of the cliffs.
Jack has blue-penciled my description of the capital luncheon arranged in advance by Mr. Thurston, holding that though I write best on the subject of food, my readers may become bored. So I pass on to Iao Valley (E-ah-o—quickly E-ow) where we drove in the afternoon, following the Wailuku River several miles to the valley mouth. On the shelving banks of this river, near the town, many Hawaiians have their homes and live in native style for the most part.
Iao has been pronounced by travelers quite as wonderful in its way as Yosemite. I should not think of comparing the two, because of their wide dissimilarity. The walls of Iao are as high, but appear higher, since the floor, if floor it can be called, is much narrower. Most gulches in Hawaii draw together from a wide entrance, but in Iao this is reversed, for, once the narrow ascending ingress is passed, the straight walls open like the covers of a book which Dore might have illustrated, the valley widening into an amphitheater of surpassing grandeur. On the ferned and mossed walls of the entrance hang festoons of deep-trumpeted, blue convolvulæ between slender dracena palms and far-reaching branches of silvery kukuis, quivering or softly swaying in passing airs.
It is foolish to try to extend any impression of the prodigious palisades with their springing bastions; the needled peaks; shimmering tropical growth of tree and vine; bursting, sounding falls of watercourses rushing headlong over mighty bowlders; the rolling glory of clouds, casting showers of gold upon joyous green pinnacles or with deep violet shadow turning these into awful fingers pointing to the zenith. Nor can one fitly characterize the climate—the zephyrs warm and the wind-puffs cool that poured over us where we lay on a table-land, reached by trail through a sylvan jungle of ferns, in matted grass so deep and dense that we never felt the solid earth.